Simple Guidance For You In Bar Mitzvah.

Alternatively, this is the day of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Free day or Bar/Bat Mitzvah Ceremony. The Bar/Bat Mitzvah day is a free day with option to arrange this important ceremony and day.

This 13 day Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah Tour is an excellent way to enjoy a mix of adventure, history, culture and sightseeing in a well organized programme. Our 13 day Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah Tour provides experiences in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Caesarea, Safed and Golan Region and so much more. Consideration of this Bar/Bat Mitzvah date is subject to your child being enrolled and participating in our Religious School (or a Day School) and being a member in good standing with our congregation.

In addition to the Bar/Bat Mitzva, what sort of plans do you have for exciting your children about Israel and their Jewish heritage? The tour connects the Bar/Bat Mitzvah participant and family to the nature, the land of Israel and its plants and scriptures. Therefore, the Sinai experience was actually a mass Bar/Bat Mitzvah of the entire Jewish people.

Following this, the bar mitzvah boy reads a portion from the biblical prophets, called the Haftorah. Colloquially speaking, when people say, “I had a Bar Mitzvah,” it means that they had an aliyah to the Torah in synagogue. At Shabbat morning services, people are called up and honored with saying the special blessings before and after the reading of each section.

For decades, thousands of families from Israel and around the world have celebrated family Bar Mitzvahs at the Western Wall, the Jewish world’s most important place of prayer. The experience can also be enhanced by including young guides who give the Bar Mitzvah boy or Bat Mitzvah girl a tour of the various sites in the Jewish Quarter. A review of early bar/bat mitzvah literature indicates that there is no authentic halakha from Torah or Talmudic sources that dictate definitive laws of a bat mitzvah ceremony.

This mode of celebration may be deemed acceptable and permissible by their related movements, though most rabbinic and pedagogic authorities disapprove of the lavish and excessive tone that bat mitzvah parties have taken on. Variations of this ceremony do exist, and creative innovations have been suggested to further distinguish the female nature of this rite of passage from the male, such as a menarche ritual proposed by Judy Petsonk. If the celebration is meant to be a public acknowledgement of a young Jewish women ‘coming of age’ in our contemporary, feminist-sensitive society, then a celebration parallel to bar mitzvah seems most appropriate, with no halakhic constrictions. Even so, until the late 1960s most Conservative celebrations happened as part of Friday night services, when the Torah is not read.

30 Rabbi David Golinkin, the chief Mesorati Rabbi of Israel, further defended the halakhik rite for women to read Torah in public and be included in minyan, 31 thereby opening the way for what has become fairly standard acceptance in Conservative synagogues today. In the early years of Reform Judaism the practice of bar/bat mitzvah was often substituted by a confirmation service, held in the later teenage years. Under his interpretation of the law, since the service took place as a gathering of women, it was permissible for girls at a bat mitzvahh to read Haftora and chant from the Torah with B’rachot, while the few invited men sat behind the mehitza.

Despite the lack of early rabbinic sources to define the bar mitzvah celebration, the ceremony evolved, by the Middle Ages, into a recognizable pattern that contained three primary elements: Baruch she-p’tarani, simchah (se’udah) shel mitzvah, d’rasha. Historically it seems that precedence for the bat mitzvah celebration can be traced almost as far back as the bar mitzvah, despite its lack of pronouncement until contemporary times. In Italy (Turin and Milan), it was customary to gather the bat mitzvah girls and the community during a weekday, have the girls stand in front of the open ark, and recite prayers, including a special prayer written for them ‘Baruch Ata Hashem lamdeynee chukecha‘ (bless teach me your statutes) and Shehechiyanu.

Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim, late Sephardi chief Rabbi of Israel, quotes from Rabbi Mussafya of Spain (1606-1675), a rabbi and personal doctor of King Christian IV of Denmark, who says that bat mitzvah is a day of celebration and the dinner is a considered a ‘se’udat mitzvah‘ (mitzvah dinner). We see then, that although the bar mitzvah experience is a highly significant life cycle event in contemporary Jewish life, the actual celebration as we know it is about 700 years old, with no firm halakhic basis. Using the term as we do today, to imply a ceremony of simcha related to the coming of age 13, is a relatively recent ritual innovation in Jewish tradition, dating only as far back as the 13th century.

Furthermore, the various forms of ceremony that have evolved around this event often overshadow the religious significance intended, thus prompting highly respected poskim like Rabbi Moshe Feinstein to claim, ‘If I had the power, I would abolish the bar mitzvah ceremony in this country. From a traditional Jewish perspective, this definition is technically incorrect, as it fuses the age factor of bar mitzvah with the celebration. One becomes a bar mitzvah at 13 years and one day or a bat mitzvah at 12 years and one day.

As part of the preparation to become a bar or bat mitzvah, most synagogues ask boys and girls to participate in a mitzvah project. A bar or bat mitzvah holds great significance for a synagogue community. Are there times besides bar/bat mitzvah when Jews are called up to the Torah for an aliyah?

Within the 19th-century traditional community, some families held as’udat mitzvah for a daughter on her 12th birthday, with the girl sometimes delivering a talk and her father reciting the Baruch Sheptarani. In the 1800s, Reform Judaism abolished bar mitzvah in favor of confirmation for both boys and girls (bat mitzvah was not considered an option at that time).

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Bar Mitzvah is a religious ceremony of Judaism . It marks the religious majority (13 years) of the young Jewish boy. It allows him to join a group of 10 men who celebrate the weekly collective service. Bar Mitzvah was not practiced in antiquity , it appears in the Middle Ages .

Bar means son and Mitzvah means good behavior / command . While doing his Bar Mitzvah, the young boy affirms that he accepts the commandments of God .

Girls have their religious majority at 12 years old. They participate in a ceremony called the Bat Mitzvah.

Conduct of a Bar Mitzvah

The Bar Mitzvah takes place in the week of the religious majority. The young boy wears tefillin on his head (box containing the philactères ) and on the shoulders the talit (prayer shawl).

On the following Monday or Thursday and Saturday ( Shabbat Day ) the boy reads the Torah. He reads the passage corresponding to the week of his religious majority. Reading the Hebrew text aloud with proper intonation is often difficult and usually requires learning.

The Shabbat morning prayer is followed by a snack with friends and family. It begins with the prayer of wine . This is an opportunity for the boy to receive gifts.